News Flash!

GIANT ANIMATED BEAR ESCAPES FROM JAPANESE ZOO AND RAMPAGES IN CHINESE CITY

A giant animated bear escaped from the Tokyo Anime Zoological Park in Ueno at 07:22 this morning. Within hours it had escaped the country and reached the Chinese mainland, whereupon it caused havoc in Qingdao, on the southern coast of the Shangdong Peninsula.



The bear, named Dekkai-chan, is approximately 80 metres tall when on all fours but can reach a fearful 150 metres tall if he rears up on his hind legs. Chinese locals were at first curious at the large cartoon bear's presence, but soon became panicked as it unwittingly crushed pedestrians, cars and buildings underfoot as it headed north towards the plains of Helongjiang Province in search of animated berries and shoots to eat.

Beijing authorities grew alarmed at the bear's approach towards the capital city and scrambled fighter jets to intercept, at which point it fled west into the mountainous regions of Qinghai Province. Its current whereabouts are unknown but there is an urgent search already underway. The United States has called for the bear's capture as soon as possible before it escapes into the Central Asian states, where it could unwittingly destroy vital oil pipelines. The Japanese government has appealed for calm, however Beijing has responded angrily, accusing Tokyo of increased militarism.

The escape comes at a time when relations are already strained between the two powerful Asian neighbours, and just after an internal report was leaked from the Tokyo Emergency Planning Centre stating that Tokyo was unprepared for another Mothra attack of the scale that struck the city in the 1950s. Some people in China suspect that the animated bear's escape is a ruse to draw attention away from domestic criticism in Japan.

The zookeeper in charge of Dekkai-chan's enclosure, who was thought to be reading manga at the time of the escape, was unavailable for comment.

Mmmm... deep, man.

I found a spectacularly rubbish statement in an art magazine yesterday, talking about the Chinese contemporary art scene.

The Chinese people have a strong experimental tendency. Their love of things like shopping and dining is a manifestation of this.

What on earth? If a love of shopping and dining proves you have a strong experimental tendency, what nation of people on earth doesn't have this tendency? North Korea? That's about the only example I can think of. And it's hardly the North Korean people's fault that they're not allowed to go shopping and wine and dine. If wining and dining is the benchmark of artistic experimentation, then the avant-garde is dead.

It's one of my goals in the art world to show people that you can write or speak about art and be intelligent without being pretentious (I hate the way these two concepts have become mixed up in England), thorough without being boring, and above all not sink into meaningless artspeak. Artspeak is a constant stream of barely-related abstract nouns which somehow have the effect of cancelling each other out ("oh but daahling, that's the subtlety of it") so by the time you get to the end of a sentence you have learned nothing from it whatsoever.

Here is a fairly standard example of Artspeak:

The work plays a chant-like loop of auditory "glow" and "shimmer". Their audio installation will join the visual to interrogate life "in disarticulated times". This interactive installation allows the viewer to reassemble the relations between the objects, invoking memory and fantasy, and embodying alternative visions of being in the world.

DigiTokio

For whatever reason the software that came with my mobile won't work on a Mac, so I can't directly download photos I've taken with my phone. But then it dawned on me that I could just email them to my computer! Ha! Still can't quite get over the fact that these aren't ordinary text messages, but actual emails to which you can attach things.

Here are a few of the oddities I've seen in the last few weeks.


It's one thing to see a lonely glove lost by the roadside, but two together, and holding hands was unusual. I couldn't tell if this had been done on purpose or not.


Emily when she came up to Tokyo a few weeks ago. She's not the oddity (well) - Note the huge lump of fat on the big plate in the upper left corner. Yes, that's for sale. Now imagine eating it.


"Honey, I'm feeling peckish, can you just pop by the convenience store and pick me up an American Dog? No, not a Jumbo Frank, an American Dog, ok?"

"........hhh.......e..."

I can't speak. Google tells me I have laryngitis, that I mustn't use my voice for a few days, suck on cough drops and gargle warm salt water. Most ironically it tells me I have to make use of a humidifier.

Here is a particularly spectacular humidifer that was in the hairdresser's I went to the other day.


It's spouting out so much water you'd think they could just skip on washing their customers' hair. And the Japanese underneath, for whatever unrelated reason says "feel free to experience it for yourself." Experience what exactly? A gush of hot steam in your face?

Ups and Downs

Up: Meeting up with Maya who's just come to Japan on business (swanky) and going to see the crazy volunteer-run playground near where I used to live in Tokyo.

Down: Crazy play park really is crazy and a health-and-safety inspector's nightmare. Rusty nails sticking out of climbing frames etc. Shortly after thinking this I fell down a hole. In such a way that I'm very, very lucky not to have broken my leg.

Up: The reason why I fell down the hole was because I was filming Maya with my digicam and not properly watching where I was going. Being lucky enough to look back and laugh about it, I now have my first "You've Been Framed" moment.

Down: Started to feel ill in the early afternoon.

Up: Went to gallery opening and met a couple of artists and gallery directors who are quite important to my studies.

Down: Ensuing three-hour dinner was boring as fuck and all I wanted to do was go home. When I finally got home I really came down with the cold/flu: I was shivering and shaking so violently I could hardly hold things.

Up: Magical herbal medicine I have brought it under control.

Down: I have the hoarsest, croakiest voice of all time.

Up: I got another part time job to complement my one at the gallery! Tokyo Art Beat is a bilingual website that lists art related events going on in Tokyo. I answered their call for volunteer translators and it turns out they're restructuring as of April and are going to give me a more permanent paid position, not just as a translator but also as a reviewer! Yay! Double yay!

Down: No down.

Up: I got a solo exhibition lined up for June at an art cafe in Tokyo! Triple yay! I've just put some basic details about it on my other site, and will update it in a month or two when I have a clearer sense of what I'm going to show.

Down: No down.

Up: Really loving my job at the gallery at the moment. They've asked me to start writing the 'special edition' articles which have remained unupdated on their site for at least a year because no one has time to do them. Quadruple yay!

Yep, life is good. A bit annoying to have to come back to England in two weeks when I'm on such a roll here, but it will be nice to see people. I'm going to Finland for five days with Saara, which I'm really looking forward to. The Moomin Museum in Tampere awaits...

Troubled Times Ahead.

I came across this trailer for a documentary called Why We Fight. Described as Farenheit 9-11 without the gimmicks, it takes a close look at the money trail within the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex in America. As Chalmers Johnson puts it, "When war becomes this profitable, you're going to see more of it."

Once you've seen the trailer, click on "Enter Site" and watch more extracts from the film, particularly the longer version of the video of President Eisenhower's final address to the nation in 1961. His warnings for the future are chilling in light of the path America is going down today.

If you combine the increasing financial need for war with the ever worsening peak oil crisis, it's not hard to see that US-led wars in the Middle East will not end anytime soon. We're being prepped for a war with Iran already. The article below might seem like internet conspiracy-theorizing, but I've read the same kinds of things in books by Noam Chomsky and Samuel P Huntingdon.

The US public sees the issue of Iran as backburner, and has little eagerness for an attack on the country at this time. A USA Today/CNN Gallup Poll from early February 2006 found that a full 86% of respondents favored either taking no action or using economic/diplomatic efforts towards Iran for now. Significantly, 69% said they were concerned "that the U.S. will be too quick to use military force in an attempt to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons."

And that begs the question: how can the US public be convinced to enter a potentially ugly and protracted war in Iran?

A domestic terrorist attack would do the trick. Just consider how long Congress went back and forth over reauthorizing Bush's Patriot Act, but how quickly opposing senators capitulated following last week's nerve-agent scare in a Senate building. The scare turned out to be a false alarm, but the Patriot Act got the support it needed.

Now consider the fact that former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi has said the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran were drawn up "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, "As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

Chew on that one a minute. The Pentagon's plan should be used in response to a terrorist attack on the US, yet is not contingent upon Iran actually having been responsible. How outlandish is this scenario: another 9/11 hits the US, the administration says it has secret information implicating Iran, the US population demands retribution and bombs start dropping on Tehran.

That's the worst-case scenario, but even the best case doesn't look good. Let's say the Bush administration chooses the UN Security Council over military power in dealing with Iran. That still leaves the proposed oil bourse, along with the economic fallout that will occur if OPEC countries snub the greenback in favor of petro-euros. At the very least, the dollar will drop and inflation could soar, so you'd think the administration would be busy tightening the nation's collective belt. But no. The US trade deficit reached a record high of $725.8 billion in 2005, and Bush & Co.'s FY 2007 budget proposes increasing deficits by $192 billion over the next five years. The nation is hemorhaging roughly $7 billion a month on military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is expected to hit its debt ceiling of $8.184 trillion next month.

So the white-knuckle ride to war continues, with the administration's goals in Iran very clear. Recklessly naïve and impetuous perhaps, but clear: stop the petro-euro oil bourse, take over Khuzestan Province (which borders Iraq and has 90% of Iran's oil) and secure the Straits of Hormuz in the process.

I read that March is the time to worry about because the Iranians will finally have sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries in place, so the Israelis will want to strike at their nuclear facilities before then. Another reason being that as they start to enrich uranium again, one of the reactors will reach a state where if you bomb it it will spread radiation everywhere. And March is when the aforementioned oil bourse will take place. Fingers crossed that this is all just a bad dream.

WTF?! (Part II)

The US sides with Iran at the UN to eradicate homosexuality. (I kid you not).

Apple Users of the World Unite!!

We are facing a new threat, comrades. Bear arms!

Meanwhile, it appears they've finally released the Powerbook G5 we've all been waiting for.

WTF?

After a pretty warm day yesterday, it's 18 degrees in Tokyo today! In February?! That's warmer than some parts of summer in the UK!

Writes Mr Moshi Moshi, to a soundtrack of... um.... um.... .... .....ooooom.... .... um.... um... ehm .... oooom.

The sound of a broken human beatbox, far far away.

My flatmate Kogo is away on a business trip to Osaka for the whole of this month. His cousin from Kobe is staying in his room while he's away, just taking a kind of holiday in Tokyo. Lovely guy, but really fucking odd when he's out of sight. Through the very thin wall connecting our rooms I can hear that periodically he lapses into a state of going "um" every ten seconds or so. It's not an "uhm" like when you're hesitating: it's a brief, deep-sounding, falling "um." Kind of like one of the sounds you can set your Apple Mac to make when you make an invalid command. And no, there's no Apple Mac in his room. It's a pretty quiet sound but it's constant. I remember a guy at school when I was fifteen and if you sat in a quiet room with him, he used to make small whimpering sounds every few minutes. Open-minded and tolerant as I'm trying to be about my temporary flatmate's psychological need to make an "um" every ten seconds or so, it's starting to annoy me. This evening it's been particularly bad: right now he's changed gear for the first time and is producing a series of rising "oooom" sounds.

And in other news...

My laptop's battery just died again. I'm not sure whether to accuse Apple of predictability or unpredictability.

Enough, enough!

Ewww. I've been subjected to too many medical images this week which ordinary members of the public should not see. On Friday I did a photography job at an eye doctor conference. It was nothing special, just photographing the speakers on stage, but I got paid well for it. Just as well, because not only was I subjected to the boredom of the event (although I did learn the Japanese words for 'corneal transplant' and 'conjunctivitis') I had to endure a constant barrage of close-up video footage of eyes being operated on - see pic below. The handiwork was impeccable, but some of the implements they use wouldn't look out of place in a torture chamber.



And then today I went to have another check up on my eardrum, which is still perforated. The doctor treated me to an ear-cam view of my own eardrums, which completely freaked me out. At least at the eye conference I could tell myself they were other people's eyes, whereas here I was watching my own eardrum get closer and closer the further he put the tube down my ear. Luckily the perforation is only about as small as the one in the picture below, but that gives you some idea of the joy I was presented with today.



So like Iso (see 'Last One To Bed' blog on right), I get to join the ear-operation club too! Yay! :-(
I'll have it at some point after I come back to Japan in April. I'm kind of knobbed off that the incision made behind my ear will cut the nerves to the top of it, but then there are worse places you can lose sensation.

New Links

I've updated the links bar at the right to include links to friends' blogs, other galleries and so on. Enjoy!

Birds of a feather...

Is there something someone's not telling us?

All Hail The Eternal Emperor!

Is this an omen?

Film 2006 with Mr Moshi Moshi

A couple of weeks ago I joined the local DVD rental shop. Cinemas are expensive here - a bare minimum of £7 for university students, in my experience. For that amount of money I can watch about 6 DVDs, and so for the last few weeks I've been picking out all sorts of films that I've always wanted to see but never had the time for.

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003). I can't believe I didn't see this at the time and I really recommend this film if you haven't seen it. I saw it a few days ago and it's been lingering on my mind ever since. It's not quite the approach you'd expect a regular director to take on Columbine-style school shootings; it drew a lot of controversy at the time, for many reasons. Whether you end up loving it or hating it, you really should see this film. The actors are almost all untrained schoolkids and the film benefits enormously from this. It's hauntingly beautiful and frankly, just haunting full stop.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991). Jim Jarmusch is one of my favourite directors, and his film Dead Man (1995) is my favourite film of all time. Night on Earth is a really funny and touching set of five stories, set in LA, NYC, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, all set in taxi cabs. I found the NYC and Paris sketches hysterically funny - all of them really tap into the place and the people they depict.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999). Set in the contemporary New Jersey side of NYC, Forest Whittaker plays a lone assassin who lives by the code of the Samurai. It sounds naff, but it's a very powerful mix of cultures, philosophies and outsider characters.

The Last Samurai (Whoever, whenever). This would have been a really intelligent film about the demise of the Samurai in Meiji Japan had it not been for the last five to ten minutes when Hollywood studio bosses clearly had a greedy orgiastic wank-fest over it and completely rewrote one of the most defining points in the history of Japan so as to get a cheapo, schmaltzy, utterly ahistorical ending. In one shitty scene in the downward spiral of shittiness that concludes this film: the entire Samurai clan get wiped out in a hail of bullets except for fucking gaijin Tom Cruise who takes one in the shoulder just so as to survive and make it into the even shittier ending.

Maborosi/幻の光 (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 1995). Very painful film about loss. Exquisitely filmed without going over the top. One of the films that gave me the momentum to apply to do Japanese at university.

Nobody Knows/誰も知らない (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2004). Based on a true story: four kids between 5 - 12 years old abandoned by their nice but somewhat fucked-up mother who has kept them secret from the neighbours. The kids are the best child actors I have ever seen - the film is charming and funny to start with but heartbreaking and bewildering by the end.

Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004). As I mentioned in an earlier post, this year started off with me going to McDonald's far too often. By two weeks after that post I had gone to McDonald's more times in a month than in the whole of 2005, about 10 -12 times. Drastic action had to be taken. Having seen this film, I swear to God I will never, ever go to McDonald's again. I would rather go hungry. Everyone knows to some extent that McDonald's is not really good for you, and that it has a bad effect on local commerce, but it's too easy to put it at the back of your mind and keep going there. You need to see this documentary to have all the information laid out in front of you in one go and realise that they (as in McD's and the other fast food chains) are literally destroying the US. This film really opened my eyes to some personal truths about why McDonald's is such an easy habit to fall into - it's literally an addiction that they aim to get you started on in your childhood. It's really not an exaggeration: if you want to know what that means, please see this film.

Stealth (Some shithead, 2005). The worst film of all time. Hands down. Absolute barrel of cunty fuckshite. This film made me puke in the aisles.

All right, I lie. I haven't actually seen it, but the trailer alone was enough to lead me to this conclusion.

Brokebacktastic!

I'm dying to see Brokeback Mountain. I've been aware of its making for about a year now and the suspense is only worsened by the fact that Japan gets films even later than England. A month ago Mr and Mrs Smith was the big deal here, for fuck's sake.

In celebratory anticipation, here is an article on how 80% of the kind of men who would kick up a homophobic fuss about Brokeback Mountain actually secretly would like to star in it.

Meanwhile, here are some brilliant parodies using the Brokeback score to rejig some older movies.

Brokeback to the Future.

Brokeback Heat.

Brokeback Hour.

Oh Fucking Hell...

Apparently Mt Fuji is going to blow any second. There's been particular speculation this winter because there was no snow on the peak despite the record levels of snow everywhere else in the country: a possible sign that it is heating up from inside. Since 2000 there have been several-month long periods of constant tremors around Fuji, which indicates magma moving underneath, possibly upwards; steam piping out of microchannels in the side; locals feeling a constant sense of unexplainable unease and now this:

"It seems the natural world fears that Fuji-san is about to blow, too. Since the start of 2004, frogs and stinkbugs once prominent in the area have virtually disappeared. Some see this as a sign that they've sensed something untoward is about to happen and they're avoiding the place like the plague. Observers have noticed this phenomenon, too."

That is NOT a good sign. Bees always return to their hives before a storm comes. The tsunami in December 2004 also revealed this phenomenon in animals:

"Scientists noticed, though, that the tsunami disaster of 2004 killed very few animals, whereas the number of human victims was immense – over 300,000 people. There are a lot of hypotheses to explain such a mysterious phenomenon, but people paid attention to animal's ability to react to imminent natural dangesr in ancient times already.

The first incident was documented in the year 2000 A.C. The ancient manuscript says that people noticed that weasels suddenly disappeared from their usual habitats in Crete shortly before a very powerful earthquake rocked the island.

Snakes suddenly appeared on the surface of the ground in the winter of 1975 in China. Snakes are cold-blooded animals; they hide in shelters and become dormant for winter periods. Local authorities treated such a “violation of biological norms” seriously and evacuated the residents. As it turned out later, the snakes forecast a mammoth earthquake, which was measured 7.3 on Richter scale. The history of the 20th century proves that animals possess a remarkable ability to foresee not only earthquakes, but tsunamis as well. There were incidents, when animals abandoned valleys prior to avalanching; London residents paid attention to cats and dogs' behavior before air raids during the WWII years.

A beacon worker in South India said in December of 2004 that he had seen a large flock of antelopes fleeing the coastal area towards nearest hills just several hours before the tsunami disaster. Eyewitnesses say that elephants were trumpeting, breaking chains and escaping inland in Thailand. Having a presentiment of a forthcoming natural disaster, flamingos left their lowlands and flew in the direction of mountainous areas as well. Employees of the Malaysian zoo noticed that all animals had a very strange way of behavior: the majority of zoo animals hid in their shelters and refused to go out.

The tsunami disaster killed over 30,000 people in Sri Lanka. However, almost all local elephants, deer and other wild animals survived the monstrous attack of tidal waves. It is worth mentioning that only one wild boar of 2,000 animals of an Indian reserve was killed in the 2004 tsunami disaster.

According to US biologists, 14 sharks, which were kept under regular observation for several years, had left their usual places of living 12 hours before Charlie hurricane hit Florida. The sharks disappeared in deep waters of the ocean and returned only two weeks later, although they have never left their natural habitat before.

Animals obviously know something that humans can never comprehend or learn. The tsunami disaster of 26 December 2004 made scientists look deeper into the mystery. Researchers have already proved that different animal species living all over the world possess the surprising ability to envisage natural catastrophes."

Some humans can feel these things too, I think. My Mum said she was in Algeria when the huge earthquake hit Morroco in the 1960s, and the day before all the birds and dogs were dead quiet and you could feel something strange in the air. I had this experience once when I was in Japan last time. There was a night when I just couldn't sleep - I was lying there so tense and rigid because I could just feel that there was going to be an earthquake and then eventually at 3am it happened - it was the biggest that happened to me in those six months. The second after it had happened I fell straight to sleep.

Ummmmmm, I don't like this. I don't like this at all. I'm keeping an eye on the Tokyo crows from now on. Come to think of it, I haven't heard a single one today.

The Mysterious Apple

I've been a Mac user since I was about 11 years old. I love Macs and am delighted that they should have a new surge in popularity thanks to the iPod and that they've come to be known as "Apples" rather than (dirty men in) Macs.

My Powerbook G4 is my first-born child (my A3 printer and my new camera being my 2nd and 3rd children.) But it seems to have reached its teenage years (3 and a half human years) because recently it's been rebelling against me. The disc drive packed in about a year ago and had to be replaced at great expense. The battery lost the power of its youth and had to go into retirement (2.5 years in human years) and that too had to be replaced. Then, programs started to shut down suddenly of their own accord, without warning, without saving.

Then, about a month ago the new battery, only a year old died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome - it just stopped working and would not charge. So my laptop then became the world's most compact desktop; if I pulled out the cord it switched off - the battery literally had no power in it.

But tonight, ladies and gentlemen, there has been a miracle. My flatmate's girlfriend managed to trip the circuits in the flat yet again, making my computer take a sudden nap right while I was in the middle of a "very important" google search. My irritation at having to restart my computer quickly subsided because the power cut must have had some kind of Frankenstein lightning effect, cos the battery has come to life again!

It's charging at the moment, so fingers crossed it's going to stay alive.

While I haven't experienced all of the problems this guy is talking about, his delivery is pretty hilarious to anyone familiar with crApple motherMACers.

And this video is a brilliant take on the future of the iPod.